The Challenge

Need to do more with less?

With today’s economic pressures, organizations like yours are looking for better ways to improve IT performance—without the big capital expense involved in expanding the infrastructure. If you’re running Intel Xeon Phi co-processors in your Platform Symphony grid environment, the solution may already be in front of you. Chances are that the co-processors are not used at full capacity all the time, and those unused cycles can be tapped to boost application performance.

The Solution

Make optimum use of what you have

Designed to use the Intel Xeon Phi co-processor as a resource, Platform Symphony Co-Processor Harvesting helps you reduce capital costs by making optimal use of available infrastructure. Using the power of the Xeon Phi co-processor together with a scaled-out application environment, you can achieve dramatic increases in application performance while minimizing costs by sharing co-processors among multiple users, applications and lines of business. Application lifecycle management costs are contained because you can support multiple versions of applications and co-processors on the same shared infrastructure.

The Benefits

Keep up with demands

Platform Symphony Co-Processor Harvesting empowers IT to:

Share compute resources for enhanced productivity

Improve application performance and reliability

Reduce application development and deployment time

Simplify management and administration

Enable fast response to real-time demands

The Specifics

Scale for maximum computing output

With IBM Platform Symphony Co-Processor Harvesting, applications can scale across multiple hosts containing co-processors. Platform Symphony dispatches compute resources to support workloads without requiring one-to-one pairing between CPUs. The software can reallocate more than 1,000 compute engines per second to different workloads, depending on user-defined sharing policies and application priorities. This capability helps reduce wait times and improve application performance and utilization, while delivering more on-demand CPU power to applications that require it.

Reduced infrastructure and management costs: Platform Symphony treats the Xeon Phi cards similar to compute nodes, enabling users to run applications natively on the Xeon Phi co-processor and manage them like any other host-based resource.

Breakthrough performance and scalability: Based on the Intel Many Integrated Core (Intel MIC) architecture, the Xeon Phi co-processor offers more than 50 compute cores for outstanding performance-per-watt, with easy programmability and scalability from small systems to large supercomputer clusters.

The right resources for the job: Platform Symphony automatically allocates the Intel Xeon Phi co-processors to application workloads that are suited for running on those resources, which frees CPU resources in a cluster so they are available to other types of workloads.